Seven golden ninjas stand trial for crimes against themselves. They perform a dance for ‘the jury’ which represents, yep, paradox. It is their defence, in their masked parading of ultimate visibility and glory in secret assassination for truth.
“Addiction to adrenalin means you feel dead inside” says the judge.
“I object your honour” says one of them “I refuse, as object, as trash, to be subject to this disposal”
“Unless your proposal is coherent” replies the judge “you will not get a hearing, do not mock us with your constant absurdities. Justify your actions”
“The story goes like this…” says one of them and they dance, all seven of them together, in canon, dance 101, in lanes of golden trophies, sideways from right to left across the stage. As they perform brisk, articulate, fluid and unfeasible movements, whose transitions are so fast it seems as if they are performing magic tricks, illusions, where you cannot tell how they get from one momentary placement to the next. As they present cohesive agility before judge, defense, prosecution and jury they knock the lines of trophies into each others lanes, corroding the boundaries between each others mock ‘race’, sending plastic trophies of men and women with their arms in the air, as if in surrender, spinning in all directions across the floor. When the last is completing this dance in a spinning linger another re-enters with a large sheet of perspex and gathers all the trophies together with this transparent flimsy wall and pushes them all off the front of the stage in a cresendo of rejections. The sound of them clattering to the floor below is followed by another entering saying ‘and this memory replaces another’ and pushing the perspex pusher off the stage also, who then rebounds off a trampoline and flies in slow motion over the heads of the first and second row of the audience to land in the conveniently vacant third row.
They clamber embarrassedly back over two rows of audience to stand on the trampoline shouting abuse at the now naked dancer on stage performing wildly angular and virtuosically spastic movements, who then jumps off the stage onto the trampoline and the two leap in succession reaching up to a suspended great white shark lit with pink light, with a muffled amplified voice repeating ‘they are transcending, they are transcending.”
Fade to black please.
Silence.
There is a voice in the darkness.
It says “The story goes like this…
This is the dance you are invited to imagine. It is independent of authority. No one owns this dance as no one owns this moment. It has no mentors, it has no teachers, it has no critics or fastidious judges, it has no abusers, it has no victims, it has no counts, it has no music, it has only witnesses, and they are silent. However, it cannot be seen either, and has never been seen before. Ever. It is an entirely wild creation which bares no resemblance to anything. You cannot even catagorise it as original and certainly not as innovative. It is inconceivable. It has no rights and no purpose and is not desirable yet it sheds light on much. It is passionate yet it does not try. It is given a towel to soak up the perspiration of its calamitous truth. It probes, it provokes, it eludes, it evades. It questions, it answers, it revers, it changes its mind yet holds a thin and exposed line of total steadfastness. And it says “Fucken good on you, you shine and don’t let anyone bring yer down to their level sweetness and light. Think of them as mosquitoes rather than vampires and you be right. Mate.”
There is then a duet between a naked man and a bug. The bug totters about on the man’s body, questioning the structure and form of his inner most thoughts, whilst getting deeply lost in the thick of his body hair. There is no violence, no violence at all.
“Objection your honour” a female voice sings out in such a vibrant song that her words are almost indistinguishable as a language. “This is mere masturbation… and that is no crime at all.”
“It is self defeating, self sabotaging, self consuming, self mutilating, self obsessive and possessive” says a golden ninja, stepping into a purple side light, as prosecutor. “It does not appeal to anyone, or even to itself, it merely marvels in delight at its own shedding. And there is NO SHEDDING here. It does not market itself. Therefore it has defeated its own purpose, proved itself ineffectual, and has committed a terrible crime. We cannot condone such liberty, such anarchy.”
“I have a secret” confesses another golden ninja “it is hidden in the rain, the subtlety of its gestures, an intricacy veiled within an obviousness. A suggestion of something so bare, so awakening. It has no fame, it has no glory. Why do you then hunt it and haunt it and tease it by not knowing and yet plundering it? You are so obtuse, you are sickeningly judging. You have so little empathy and think no one knows of your earthquakes. Well I do, I feel them deep inside me. They hurt, you know. But what can we do, but feel them and remain strong in the face of such wrath.”
“What the hell is going on here?” yells out a bemused audience member within a brief silent pause.
“You tell us!” sing the entire cast and court together “Give us our next task, what do YOU want to experience next because we are at a loss”
“NO! I want to know what all this is about, it is gibberish and I don’t think you even know what you are really doing, or saying!”
Silence.
“Well, do you?”
“Yes, of course we do, but we are quite happy to incorporate your tantrum into our show. What is it, dear friend, that you so wish to be seeing and hearing, then?” asks the judge.
“I want to see sense, I see no sense here, and within the chaos of my life and our world I want this art to make sense” states the audience person.
“There is plenty of sense here, the senses are quite heightened to sensation.
Touch the person next to you, asking them first and without pinching them to see whether they are you and you are in a dream. Why don’t you pleasure yourself infact, or another and just enjoy your mysteries instead of trying to shatter ours and fighting the unknown with your deadening and dire need for clarification” replies the judge.
“So you do claim authority?!”
“Of course we do, and we also invite you to join us if you want to, come up here on stage and be part of our mystery, our unsolved crimes of the art, come on now.”
And s/he did. Ran away with the circus. Practised some juggling on the side of the stage for a bit, played with some fire. Tried some bad comedy routines. Then immediately became further incriminated in the acts also.
And this is how it began. We would be facetious to say this as a truism.
How many routine isms can we make in one sitting, one hearing, one screaming, one dancing, one one one.
So then, when this s/he finally got somewhere with their own act and we all waited for them patiently for many years to get good, they too dressed as a golden ninja, came into the light as a mock audition and tried to humorously describe to the court what the word that doesn’t exist for something that remains whole yet moves in opposite directions, without being schizophrenic, is perhaps a term in physics or philosophy and not a duality or a paradox, and like time moved, was. It was all very intriguing. The gestures, the words, the intention, the ernestness, all employed in this one attempt was absolutely engrossing. There was no irony here.
“Well this still doesn’t explain or justify the crimes committed here with any clarity” the judge responded shortly after a standing ovation. Perhaps the judge was jealous. As this absolute indecipherable twoddle, the antithesis to high entertainment, was receiving such good audience applause. That must be so infuriating. Such is life. Unstoppable, insatiable.
No matter how much a thing or a one tries to squash it.
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